Progress update you might find helpful

Darren Taylor

Darren Taylor

I've Got It
I want to share an update of my progress on YouTube as many of my fellow small YouTubers might find it useful.

I recently posted on this forum that after 2 years on YouTube I got to 2k subs. 1k earned in the first year and 1k in the second year :D

I predicted that I would get 3k in year 3 based on my channel data over 2 years, but I made some key changes to my channel and now I am +700 subs after only 3 months into my 3rd year on YT, bringing my count to 2.7k - the rate of subs and views per week is still increasing on an upward trend too!




These are the changes I made in year 3

  • Went from an upload every 3 days DOWN to just one a week on a Monday (or Tuesday if I am super busy)
  • Really focused on quality and delivery, often re-filming elements and spending a lot of time on editing and adding diagrams and visuals (hence only being able to do 1 per week)
  • Made sure that I ALWAYS write a very long description, as painful as it is (I'm talking over 3k characters long, excluding usual social media links etc.)
  • I now ALWAYS link to other videos on my channel in the description
  • Re-branded my thumbnails to make the text much larger and more readable. Also made them graphically consistent with my logo in all of them
  • I now ALWAYS ask the person watching to 'comment and like' the video after around 3 minutes, which is about 30-40 seconds before my average view duration
  • This one is weird - I moved house! I now have a dedicated space for my videos which means I can use a 50mm prime lens (which creates the blurred background while I'm in focus) It also means I can make the backdrop more appealing
  • I now plan my videos for an hour as opposed to what I used to do, which is write few bullet points and get on camera - planning means I think of more valuable points when I wouldn't have before
  • I tell viewers that I 'Will reply to every single comment' and I do
  • I stopped using background music, I have a deep voice and I think it was distracting
  • I speak much slower than I used to, because I have a London accent, my US and Indian viewers (which is the majority) probably couldn't understand me :D


Hope people find this useful! Keep at it, growth could be around the corner!
 
Wow, thanks for your update. and congrats on your growth. I just started today, and i can already see i've made a few mistakes based on your post, i look foward to adjusting and hopefully grow as fast as you :)
 
Good for you. Excellent points which I will be sure to include.
The note about slowing down speech really hits home. I must do that too as a lot of my views come from Pakistan.
 
Nice man, thanks for sharing! I just started my channel about 8 months ago, and its been a painful growth process. So it's good to see some actionable things I can start doing to improve my channel. Congrats on your growth also.
 
Holy you didnt mention anything actually useful such as video tags. liking all comments you receive. and trying to use keywords that can also be found in your title and description. 99% of the stuff you mentioned wont help grow a channel fast. no wonder 1k a year sounds reasonable to you. I made 1800 subs just in the last 30 days alone and I don't even try with my video content. its mostly really good titles and tags and description so the youtube algorithm does its thing.


I suggest a free plugin called vidIQ if youre new and want to see other peoples tags. I would find videos on topics similar to mine. and steal their best ranked tags. from there once I have enough I would plan my title for the video to have as many of the best ranked tags included in the title.

then I would form my description and text for description using as many tag key words as possible but organically in a sentence. thats 3 points right there that youtube can see the tag in use. Now when someone looks up those keywords my video is highly ranked because I used the tags in a few places.


In case anyone is curious on my demographics. I have over 23k subs.

about 92% of viewers are women between 18-32 I would say and thats because of careful tagging and title descriptions.

also if possible have your face in the thumbnail of the video. I find that increases chance of clicks if there is a human on the thumbnail. I literally use a different font and color and size for EVERY single one of my videos so saying to use a template or keep the same look means absolutely nothing. you can do it but that also gets boring and we all know subscribers have a low attention span. If anything I would say constantly change things up and split test. split test, split test and do more split testing of material.

hope you don't mind me hijacking to share this info but I feel you left out a lot. I might write a guide here soon on how to properly work with the youtube algorithm. my most recent video got 5k views in under 2 hours doing this. and over 25% of my viewers are new people that have never seen my content before. youtube usually does the promoting for me.



Picture of my stats from social blade should anyone be curious. I know its not much. but its something :)
2019-12-23_18-35-21.png
 
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